Joshua Gates will graduate from Minnesota State University Moorhead with cum laude honors, a summer internship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and a scholarship and stipend that put him on track for a master’s degree. Dave Wallis / The Forum

By: Helmut Schmidt, INFORUM

MOORHEAD – In just a few short years, the arc of Joshua Gates’ academic life has gone from meh to marvelous.

Gates’ identity at Mayville (N.D.) High School was as a football, basketball, track and baseball standout. But that didn’t transfer to the classroom.

He had a 2.5 grade-point average and was 47th out of a graduating class of 54 in 2009, he said. His college placement test scores were borderline.

Most subjects were tedious to Gates, but he loved history and has wanted to work in museums since he was a child – perhaps even the Smithsonian Institution, he told people.

His teachers told him he might teach history in a middle school or high school. His father pointed him to the military.

“I thought I could do better. I thought I could do more,” Gates said.

Turns out, he did.

Today, Gates will graduate from Minnesota State University Moorhead rocking a 3.5 GPA and a political science degree with a coaching minor.

His summer will be spent as an intern in the curatorial office of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

And he scored a generous scholarship and stipend at the University of Delaware that puts him on track for a master’s degree.

“I am ready” for the next step, Gates said. “It’s been a good four years, but a long four years.”

Gates said an MSUM academic bootstrap program at the now-closed Corrick Center got him on track for success.

A series of teachers also encouraged him and got him to embrace the life of the mind.

He credits his adviser Margaret Sankey, who was also one of his principal history instructors, with keeping him focused.

“Once I had him in class, I could see how interested he was in research,” Sankey said.

“I have no doubt that any museum that gets Josh will get someone 200 percent engaged,” she said. “I can’t wait to see what he’s going to do.”

Gates worked several jobs to help pay his way through school.

On campus, he worked at the Academic Support Center, and did tutoring and peer advising.

Off campus, he worked as a cleaning specialist for Servicemaster, and at the Moorhead Sports Center as a Zamboni ice-surfacing machine driver.

“I wanted an education, so I paid for it,” he said. “I got used to six hours of sleep.”

He said he had to become very good at time management and self-motivation to keep up with his studies. He deliberately kept a rein on his social life.

“I had to prove to myself that I could do better without sports,” he said. “At the college, I just woke up, so to speak. “

This fall, he’ll attend the University of Delaware in Newark and pursue a master’s in historic preservation with certificates in museum studies and public history.

He’s been awarded a 90 percent scholarship and an annual research stipend of more than $16,000.

Eventually, he said he’d like to try for a doctorate.

Earlier this week, as the sun beat down on the campus quadrangle and the buds on the trees were leafing out, he looked out over the scene from the steps of MacLean Hall.

“I just loved the environment, the encouragement, the relationships” with teachers, he said. “I’ll greatly miss them, but it’s also time for the next chapter.

“I’ll miss this whole place, really,” he said.

MSUM’s commencement ceremonies are at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. today in the Alex Nemzek Fieldhouse.

The 10 a.m. ceremony will include graduates from the College of Social and Natural Sciences and the College of Business and Industry.

The 2 p.m. ceremony will include graduates from the College of Education and Human Services and the College of Arts and Humanities.

http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/400100/

Vanderbilt, whose many legacies include the founding of Vanderbilt University, was the richest man in America in 1877, according to Stiles, author of the award-winning biography The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The book received the National Book Award in 2009 and the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2010.

The First Tycoon portrays Vanderbilt as a force who helped launch the transportation revolution, advance the Gold Rush, shape Manhattan, and invent American capitalism and modern corporations.  Vanderbilt created a steamboat and railway empire on the way to becoming the second wealthiest man in U.S. history.

The New York Times called Stiles’ book a “mighty… work, one that moves with force and conviction and imperious wit through Vanderbilt’s noisy life and times.”

In addition to The First Tycoon, Stiles is the author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, which was a New York Times Notable Book.  Currently, Stiles is writing a biography of George Armstrong Custer. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic online, Smithsonian, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and taught nonfiction creative writing at Columbia University.  He served as historical advisor and on-screen expert for “Jesse James” and “Grand Central,” two films in the PBS series The American Experience.

A native of Foley, Minn., Stiles studied history at Carleton College and Columbia University, and lived in New York City for 20 years.  He now lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.

Stiles’ talk is free and open to the public. Parking is available in MSUM lots adjacent to the Science Lab. For more information about the lecture, email Steve Hoffbeck at hoffbeck@mnstate.edu, or call 218.477.4041; or email Sean Taylor at sean.taylor@mac.com or call him at 218.477.2814.

Join Dr. Steve Hoffbeck, History, for a history of the Pearl Harbor attack. His talk will include the impact of the attack and how Minnesotans responded to the onset of World War II, sending soldiers to the battlefronts and enduring shortages and rationing of vital materials.

This event is free.

For more information call 218.233.7594

Moorhead Public Library:
118 5th Street South
Moorhead, MN 56560

http://larl.org/moorhead/

Contact Nathan Clarke clarke@mnstate.edu of the History Department or the Study Abroad office stdyabrd@mnstate.edu for more information. Deadline to enroll: November 30, 2012.

Join us in celebrating Constitution Day Tuesday, September 18 from 1:30-2:30 p.m. in Center for Business Room 103. Judge Erickson will give a 45-minute presentation titled, “Mr. Madison We Have a Problem: This Constitution is Wonderful and All but We Can’t Agree on What it Means.”

He will discuss the four basic camps of constitutional interpretation:

1. Textual Originalism
2. Intentionalist Originalism
3. Pragmatism
4. Natural Law theory

Judge Erickson is one of two active U.S. District Judges in North Dakota. He is a graduate of Jamestown College and the University of North Dakota School of Law. Following his graduation from Law School, Judge Erickson was in the private practice of law in West Fargo with a broad general trial practice. During his career as a judge, Judge Erickson has sat with every state and federal court having jurisdiction in North Dakota except the United States Supreme Court. Erickson is married and has two school-aged daughters.

Refreshments will be served.

“Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong”
Author: Dr. James W. Loewen
Thursday, September 13 7:00 p.m.
MSUM Weld Hall

Dr. Loewen will be addressing the misinformation and myopia of history textbooks used in classrooms across the country. His presentation challenges the audience to search for truth and rethink how the history of our nation is taught.

You may also want to visit Dr. Loewen’s website for additional information about his books and other publications.

MSUM grad Peter Gulsvig, right, stands with Tom Kenny, the voice of cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants, at this year’s Comic-Con.

By: Sam Benshoof, INFORUM

ATLANTA – When Peter Gulsvig talks about how he spends his days working with cartoons, even he still sounds a little surprised by it.

The Moorhead native and 2008 Minnesota State University Moorhead grad is now working as a key animator for Bento Box Atlanta, a cartoon production company.

But when he discusses what he does every day for his job, Gulsvig, 27, who majored in history in college, still can’t seem to quite believe his luck.

“I was very blessed to get probably one of the best jobs I could have gotten,” he says.

Gulsvig started with Bento Box in June, and is now working on “Out There,” a cartoon series that will premiere in January on the Independent Film Channel.

According to IFC, the show “follows the coming-of-age adventures of Chad, his little brother, Jay, and best friend, Chris.”

So far, three 22-minute episodes of the series have been produced, and Gulsvig says he expects to personally work on three or four more before the season is complete.

Despite the fact that each episode isn’t even half an hour long, they take a whole lot longer to create, Gulsvig says.

Typically, animators spend about five weeks on each episode, he says, and it probably takes another couple of weeks for all departments to complete their work.

In his role as an animator, Gulsvig is passed along storyboards of the cartoon as well as audio and dialogue. The audio is typically mostly finished, he says, but that’s not always the case with the storyboard, which gives the episode direction.

“In ‘Out There,’ the storyboards are very loose, so that gives me a lot of freedom to have the characters do whatever I want,” Gulsvig says.

Animators will sometimes actually draw stills by hand for the series, but Gulsvig says characters are mostly based on models – “almost like little puppets,” he says.

“If you watch ‘South Park,’ it’s pretty clear that they’re not hand-drawn, per se,” he says.

Gulsvig then animates and edits those puppets using a digital program called Toon Boom. Before the episode gets passed on to be completed, it’s watched closely by Gulsvig and other animators. Then watched again.

“It’s amazing what you can miss when you’ve been working on something six, eight hours,” he says.

It helps that the people he works with on a regular basis are no strangers to the animation industry – the creator of “Out There” was the long-term animation director of “South Park,” and the production head of the company was the animation director of shows like “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and “Squidbillies.”

“I’m very fortunate that the animators I’ve been working with have been in the industry for many years now,” Gulsvig says.

An animator with a history degree

To get into the animation industry, Gulsvig took something of a meandering, unexpected route.

Even though he says he was always interested in the arts while at MSUM, Gulsvig ended up majoring in history, which interested him the most.

And while a history degree might not seem like the best tool for getting into animation, that’s not necessarily the case, says MSUM political science professor Margaret Sankey, who taught Gulsvig in several history classes.

“I know that some of the history he really enjoyed; I can kind of see that reflected in his animation,” Sankey says. “It’s taking literature and history and really combining it with his talent, and that’s just wonderful.”

After graduating from MSUM, Gulsvig spent a year in South Korea teaching English before coming back to North America for a one-year program in 2011 at the Vancouver Film School, which he says prepared him the most for his current job.

While in school, he made a short, eccentric three-minute animated film called “Don’t Be Nervous,” which has since been featured at the 2012 Comic-Con, as well as at this year’s Fargo Film Festival.

When he was working on that film, Gulsvig says he wanted to put in the effort to create something that people would remember and that he would be able to show off at future festivals.

“I love watching something and not knowing how it’s going to end,” he says. “We have so many stories now where you know how it’s going to end, and I think it’s rare and it’s treasured when you don’t.”

http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/373064/group/Variety/

Image is from Amazon.com, accessed on September 4, 2012.

Steve Hoffbeck, History, contributed a chapter to a new book on baseball history entitled The National Pastime, 2012: Short But Wondrous Summers: Baseball in the North Star State, a June publication of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

The book, available on Amazon.com and other online booksellers, tells the history of baseball in Minnesota from the 1870s to modern times. Hoffbeck co-wrote a chapter, “On the Wrong Side of the Color Line in Minnesota: Pitcher John Donaldson,” with Peter Gorton, a baseball writer from Minneapolis. The chapter outlines the history of black baseball in Minnesota and then focuses on John Donaldson, the best left-handed African-American barnstorming pitcher of the pre-Negro Leagues era. Donaldson was a predecessor of the legendary Hall of Famer pitcher, Satchel Paige.

MSUM recent graduate joins West Fargo Pioneer staff as News/Sports Editor. This article is from the West Fargo Pioneer.

Daniel Determan has joined the staff of the West Fargo Pioneer, the West Fargo News, and its subsidiary publications as News/Sports Editor.

A native of Browerville, Minn., Determan is a 2012 graduate of Minnesota State University Moorhead with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and a minor in mass communications.

Most recently, Determan served as sports editor of the MSUM Advocate and prior to that was sports coordinator for MSUM Intramurals for five years.

In his role with the Pioneer/News, Determan will be covering West Fargo sports, school board and related school- events, as well as other news and feature story lines as they unfold in the community.

In time away from work, Determan enjoys playing softball and hockey, running, going to movies and spending time with his friends and family.

You can reach Determan by phone at 701-451-5717 or email at ddeterman@westfargopioneer.com.

http://www.westfargopioneer.com/event/article/id/20294/

For almost 40 years, Baldwin  was America’s best-known military affairs writer and analyst whose primary forum was the New York Times. A naval academy graduate (1924) he joined the Times in October 1929. During his career he had memorable news scoops including his report on the loss of four allied cruisers at the Battle of Savo Island (1942), the real story behind the 1960 U-2 spy plane incident, and the clustering of Soviet ICBM missile sites in 1962. He wrote that the war in Vietnam was mismanaged by Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, and and he accused President Johnson of refusing to tell the American public what it would take to win that unpopular war. Baldwin retired in 1968 and lived until 1991.

Davies taught in the history department at MSUM for 32 years. He retired in 1998 and now lives in Bow, N.H.

“Robert Davies has written a thoughtful, sensitive, and readable account of a journalistic giant. As the military correspondent of the New York Times during World War II and during the height of the Cold War, Hanson Baldwin explained American power at its peak. He was in some ways a rigid Victorian but also a humanist, and he held himself to a high standard that makes one nostalgic for the newspapering of an earlier age.”

—EVAN THOMAS, author of The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898

BnBaldwin of the Times

A drive-in restaurant in Grand Forks, North Dakota has been listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The National Register of Historic Places is the federal government’s list of properties it considers worthy of preservation and recognition.

The Kegs Drive-In is made up of two barrel-shaped wooded structures, with a rectangular middle building that serves as the front counter for the drive-in restaurant. Originally built in 1935, each was an individual two story Barrel Root Beer Stand built by William Harry Muzzy. These barrels were built in an eclectic style of roadside buildings that fits within a category called “programmatic architecture.” By 1946, both barrels were moved to this location and became known as The Kegs Drive-In.  The Kegs has been serving frosty mugs of root beer and making the best burgers in Grand Forks for over 75 years. The State Historical Society of North Dakota announced the listing of the KEGS root beer stand this week.